I’m attempting to install the lastest trunk of 1.8-devel and have run into some errors that I think may be do to missing gems.  However, I can’t tell from the error what dependency is not satisfied.  The error I receive is:

[Sun Feb 14 21:36:34 2010] [notice] mod_fcgid: process /home/username/public_html/tracks/dispatch.fcgi(9090) exit(communication error), terminated by calling exit(), return code: 1
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `run’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `send’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:132:in `process’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:301:in `add_gem_load_paths’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:301:in `each’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:301:in `add_gem_load_paths’
  from /home/username/tracks-1.8d/vendor/rails/railties/lib/rails/gem_dependency.rb:73:in `add_load_paths’

Here is what I have in my environment.rb file for the gem loads:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  # Skip frameworks you’re not going to use
  config.frameworks -= [ :action_web_service, :action_mailer ]
  config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/apis )

  config.gem “highline”
  config.gem “RedCloth”
  config.gem “soap4r”, :lib => false
  config.gem ‘datanoise-actionwebservice’, :lib => ‘actionwebservice’
  config.gem ‘rubyist-aasm’, :version => ‘~> 2.0.2’, :lib => ‘aasm’

do you have shell access? You can then first try to run tracks without fcgi using script/server

otherwise, look at the tracks logs for more information. The communication error is not very specific and may (or may not) have anything to do with missing gems.

Did you run rake gems:install RAILS_ENV=production

The problem, as I found, was that it could not locate the rubyist-aasm gem.  I removed the version requirement in the environment.rb file and got it working!

great! have fun